Proposals have been made that the United Nations should adopt the same form of democratic system as used in most of its member states. While it must be conceded that the immediate prospect of this is rather unlikely, that does not mean that the idea should be dismissed out of hand.

After all, as in the European Union, and as in most democratic countries, democracy comes gradually, in a series of steps, and not as the result of an overnight transformation.

With that in mind, the basic idea of federalism – that democracy and the rule of law should apply just as much at international level as they do nationally – has great importance.

For example, global flows of money are now far beyond the power of any national authority to regulate or control, but the relevant global bodies, such as the World Trade Organisation and the IMF, lack legitimacy. Bringing democratic principles into global economic institutions will make possible a fairer and more prosperous global economy.

Similarly, we face environmental and humanitarian problems on an unprecedented scale, but the international institutions and agreements lack powers and they lack teeth. The biggest threats to our environment ought to get the most concerted response, but because they are international, they often get the least. We need to globalise our ways of dealing with threats to match the way in which those threats too have changed.

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The EU is hard to define exactly what it is. The closest I can find is one similar in fashion to a Confederate Union of states, but with a difference of having a politburo at its head, called the Commission. It’s easy to understand why many people have altered the name of the EU into the EUSSR.

World Parliament Now is an exciting development as it converges with the longstanding work of the World Constitution and Parliament Association — organizing agent for the Provisional World Parliament. WCPA’s Earth Constitution, drafted by world citizens over a period of 30 years, is a model democratic federal world union constitution — written with the expressed purpose of replacing the flawed and obsolete (and, yes, undemocratic) UN Charter.

The 13th Session of this Provisional World Parliament is being held in Lucknow, India in Dec., 2013. As I see it, the “gradual” strategy to achieve a world federation is a serious strategic blunder considering how quickly a movement can emerge given the global capability of the Internet, and how urgent it is to move to eliminate all nuclear weapons and deal with climate change.

We are living during the great transition from inter-nationalism to true globalism. Experience indicates that Western-style democratic federalism is the best way of establishing a government which will establish the rule of law while protecting human rights. The global community needs a democratic federal government just as nations do.
That global democratic community will function best if all members of the community think of themselves first as world citizens and only secondarily as citizens of this or that country. Language is critical to the formation of identity whether one considers a national language for the national community or a global language for the global community. Therefore it is important for everyone in the global community to have a common language which is not a national language. My experience is that Esperanto, the language designed by L. L. Zamenhof near the end of the 19th century and almost adopted by the League of Nations in 1921, provides that global language and should be taught to all children as their first foreign language. Mi rekomendas Esperanton.

We need to replace the UN Charter with the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. The UN Charter is most fundamentally a treaty of sovereign nations. It is not a matter of reforming the charter to make it work better because as long as we retain the absurd and lawless principle of absolute national sovereignty the world will remain a war system, a wealth and poverty system, and an environmentally destructive system. We need to unite the nations and peoples of the world under the Earth Constitution: a peace system, a prosperity system, and a sustainability system. The agencies of the UN can then function effectively once the unworkable charter is replaced with a real federal constitution, and by far the best model for this is the Earth Constitution. http://www.earth-constitution.org.